Quotes by American Authors - Page 156

Enjoy the little things for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.
Robert Brault
The mere sense of living is joy enough.
Emily Dickinson
Happiness consists more in small conveniences or pleasures that occur every day than in great pieces of good fortune that happen but seldom.
Benjamin Franklin
I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet simple things of life which are the real ones after all.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
We women ought to put first things first. Why should we mind if men have their faces on the money as long as we get our hands on it?
Ivy Baker Priest
I don't think about whether people will remember me or not. I've been an okay person. I've learned a lot. I've taught people a thing or two. That's what's important.
Julia Child
Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones not the birthdays the graduations the weddings not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory.
Susan B. Anthony
Yes there is a Nirvanah it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture and in putting your child to sleep and in writing the last line of your poem.
Kahlil Gibran
I have had more than half a century of such happiness. A great deal of worry and sorrow too but never a worry or a sorrow that was not offset by a purple iris a lark a bluebird or a dewy morning glory.
Mary McLeod Bethune
Happiness lies in the joy of achieve ment and the thrill of creative effort.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accom plished something.
Henry Ford
True happiness we are told consists in getting out of one's self. But the point is not only to get out you must stay out. And to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.
Henry James
Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere wholeheartedly one-directionally without regret or reservation.
William H. Sheldon
He who never sacrificed a present to a future good or a personal to a general one can speak of happiness only as the blind speak of color.
Horace Mann
The happiest excitement in life is to be convinced that one is fighting for all one is worth on behalf of some clearly seen and deeply felt good.
Ruth Benedict
Happiness is the natural flower of duty.
Phillips Brooks
Happiness is the overcoming of not unknown obstacles toward a known goal.
L. Ron Hubbard
Seek happiness for its own sake and you will not find it seek for duty and happiness will follow as the shadow comes with the sunshine.
Tyron Edwards
Life is not always what one wants it to be but to make the best of it as it is is the only way of being happy.
Jennie Jerome Churchill
Happiness is experienced when your life gives you what you are willing to accept.
Ken Keyes
The happiest people are those who are too busy to notice whether they are or not.
William Feather
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana
In great moments life seems neither right nor wrong but something greater: it seems inevitable.
Margaret Sherwood
Never mind your happiness do your duty.
Will Durant
True happiness ... is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
Helen Keller
Human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.
George Washington
To be busy is man's only happiness.
Mark Twain
The formula for complete happiness is to be very busy.
A. Edward Newton
If you observe a really happy man you will find ... that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of each day.
W. Beran Wolfe
To fill the hour and leave no crevice ... that is happiness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something to secure it in this world we must do something.
Charlotte P. Gilman
Painting's not important. The important thing is keeping busy.
Grandma Moses
I want a busy life a just mind and a timely death.
Zora Neale Hurston
I am enjoying to a full that period of reflection which is the happiest conclusion to a life of action.
Willa Cather
Happiness is action.
David Thomas
Action may not always bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.
William James
Happiness is not something you get but something you do.
Marcelene Cox
The needle of our conscience is as good a compass as any.
Ruth Wolff
There is only one history of any importance and it is the history of what you once believed in and the history of what you came to believe in.
Kay Boyle
It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself.
Thomas Paine
Let how you live your life stand for something no matter how small and incidental it may seem.
Jodie Foster
If you aren't good at loving yourself you will have a difficult time loving anyone since you'll resent the time and energy you give another person that you aren't even giving to yourself.
Barbara De Angelis
The principles we live by in business and in social life are the most important part of happiness.
Harry Harrison
I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
Lillian Hellman
Conscience as I understand it is the impulse to do the right thing because it is right regardless of personal ends and has nothing whatever to do with the ability to distinguish between right and wrong.
Margaret Collier Graham
The attainment of justice is the highest human endeavor.
Florence Ellinwood Allen
Happiness is mostly a by-product of doing what makes us feel fulfilled.
Dr. Benjamin Spock
Happiness is not a goal it is a byproduct.
Eleanor Roosevelt
If you ever find happiness by hunting for it you will find it as the old woman did her lost spectacles safe on her nose all the time.
Josh Billings
Happiness in this world when it comes comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit and it leads us on a wild-goose chase and is never attained. Follow some other object and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.
Edith Wharton
Happiness is like a cat. If you try to coax it or call it it will avoid you. It will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business you'll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap.
William Bennett
Happiness sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open.
John Barrymore
Happiness comes most to persons who seek it least and think least about it. It is not an object to be sought it is a state to be induced. It must follow and not lead. It must overtake you and not you overtake it.
John Burroughs
Deliberately to pursue happiness is not the surest way of achieving it. Seek it for its own sake and I doubt whether you will find it.
Robert J. McCracken
Seek to do good and you will find that happiness will run after you.
James Freeman Clarke
The only way to happiness is never to give happiness a thought.
Elton Trueblood
Enjoyment is not a goal it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity.
Paul Goodman
The bird of paradise alights only on the hand that does not grasp.
John Berry
Some of us might find happiness if we quit struggling so desperately for it.
William Feather